The Fragmented Form(s) and Context(s) of Modernist Poetics

This session will explore poetic Modernism in terms of form and context, examining its simultaneous subversion and incorporation of what came before. Papers are invited to deal with the evolution of the craft demonstrated by major poets like Eliot, Pound, and Yeats or later poets such as Auden, MacNeice, and David Jones. Alternatively, we invite papers on poetic forms as a reflection of or reaction to the destabilized rhetoric used in the liberal and conservative political maneuvers leading up to WWI.

Within the reactionary context of the conservative reaction to progressivism, Modernists attempted to make new what came before. Papers might consider the appropriation of nationalist identity made popular by W.B. Yeats, the scathing cries for social justice penned by Pound in his Cantos, or, on a personal level, the destabilization of identity found in Eliot's Prufrock. In terms of identity, scholars might explore David Jones's prose poem In Parenthesis as an application of Modernist poetics to the unification of wartime identity with what comes after (nationally or locally). Overarching themes to consider could include anxiety, tradition and nostalgia, the shortcomings of rationalist thought, war, beauty, fragmentation, nationalism, or subtleties of the genre not mentioned in this call for papers.